Punch the Clock Day

Before your next (and final) holiday update, I thought I’d take the time to let everyone know that NEW STORIES are coming starting tomorrow, since this is actually a writing blog, after all. Apparently we just got a little too carried away with Waste Your Time and Do Pointless Things Week.

January 27th: Punch the Clock Day

What it is: January 27th, A.K.A. Punch the Clock Day, presents an interesting couple of questions, the first being, “Why would I want to punch a clock?” Of course, if you don’t already know the answer to that, maybe you should just stop reading now. This blog is clearly beyond you. The second is, “Do I really need a day for something I could do any time?” Before you ask that, though, stop and think about the repercussions. If you could just punch clocks whenever you wanted, where would the world be today? We probably wouldn’t have even stopped punching clocks long enough to invent clocks. And clock punching is just the beginning. Imagine all the watch stomping, calendar kickboxing, and sundial ear-biting that we’d have to deal with. You should be thankful there’s even a day at all, you little ingrate.

Origins: Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. “A stitch in time saves nine,” she said, bringing the phrase into popularity. But people don’t seem to remember that this wasn’t the entire quote. She went on to say, “And why did that motherfucker time even need stitches in the first place? Because I punched the shit out of it.”

Ways to celebrate: Buy some boxing gloves, drink raw eggs, and beat up a wimpy-looking clock when its friends aren’t around. Then call me and say happy birthday. That’s the reason I even bothered with this holiday in the first place.

Bill of Rights Day

December 15th: Bill of Rights Day

What it is: Bill of rights day, known by many as little more than the annoying little brother of constitution day, which has recently made its bid to become the poor man’s July 4^th, marks the anniversary of the addition of the william of easts, less formally known as the bill of rights, to the United States Constitution. Without 'ol Bill you wouldn't enjoy such widely respected rights as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the right to remain silent. Without the bill of rights you could kiss the fiery, government-criticizing speech you gave supporting the greek gods goodbye, and don't even think about NOT giving a speech, because otherwise they'd nab you for remaining silent. That's right, they've got you at every hypothetical turn.

Ways to celebrate: Make this bill of rights day one to remember by exercising every single one of your constitutional rights as they were before the supreme court went ahead and ruined them all. Shout fire in a crowded theater! Lace all of your sentences with profanity that fails the community standards test! Commit libel! Petition everyone you know, then sue the HELL out of them for not giving you the response you're entitled to! This day is yours, America.

Just don't jaywalk. You know how I feel about that.

Bathtub Party Day

December 5th: Bathtub Party Day

What it is: Right around this time of year, you may find yourself thinking, “Gee, I sure love the holidays, but what I need now is something to ease the transition between Thanksgiving and Christmas. If only there were a day that somehow combined aspects of both of these – something involving both bathtubs AND parties.” Well, you’re in luck, because Bathtub Party Day is here just for you and your bathtub-filled Thanksgivings. But remember, be careful – there are more bathtub party related injuries today than any other day of the year, and that’s saying something.

Origins: Actually, this holiday was never meant for humans. In 1948, bathtubs decided to create a day they could take off work and maybe have a party or two. Unfortunately, people mistook the name to mean “Party in or Around a Bathtub Day” instead of the intended “Party Day for Bathtubs,” and now bathtubs have more work on their own holiday than on any other day of the year. It’s a cruel irony, yes, but honestly, with holiday-naming skills like that, those tubs deserved it.

Ways to celebrate: Really? Do you seriously need someone to tell you?

Oh, and P.S. – stay away from bubbles. It may seem like a good idea at the time, but you’ll regret it in the morning.

National Roof Over Your Head Day

December 3rd: National Roof Over Your Head Day

What it is: This December 3rd, take an entire day to think about how completely awesome it is to have a roof over your head. Seriously, that's it.

Unfortunately, my very reputable source of obscure holidays has yet to track down the origin of this particular holiday. Because of the high possibility of this being an addition meant to celebrate national make shit up day (which is not today, if you were wondering), I feel as though the only proper means of celebrating would be to use the political process in the most advantageous way possible to getting this one legitimized. Therefore:

Ways to celebrate: Start campaigning for Jimmy McMillen.

And party every day

With Thanksgiving officially over and my vaguely threatening proposals to officially declare December 2^nd to be "You’reWelcomesgiving" still garnering cease and desist letters from the secret service, you celebratory folks may be finding yourself sinking yet again into that deep depression that comes with the knowledge that Christmas is still a month away. Well, since it’s one of my life goals to make each and every day a celebration, we’ve decided to officially declare the next few days “Reveal Obscure Holidays Week!” Basically, we’ll give you all reasons to party like it’s 1945, and then at the end David and I will both post more writing, since that’s technically the point here.

And away we go.

November 28^th: Red Planet Day

What it is: Red Planet Day honors our favorite impending alien invasion threat: Mars! According to the first google result I got for "obscure holidays," November 28, 1964 marks the launch of the Spacecraft Mariner 4, which, from what I can tell, got really close to mars but didn't actually go there. I think we can all sleep easier knowing that the 1964 versions of ourselves were perfectly capable of taking pictures of the Martian surface, a fact which undoubtedly led to the end of the cold war. Take that, John Lennon. (Note: No, I'm not mistaken.)

Ways to celebrate: In addition to that massive, red-themed party you've started planning by now, there are plenty of other, more subtle ways you can honor the 4th rock from Neptune (see what I did there?) If you have a friend named Mark, Maria, Mary, Marvin, Marizuccio, or Marge, call them Mars for the entire day! Make a hilarious knowledge-withholding game out of refusing to tell them why their name has inexplicably changed. Get your friends involved! Break into Federal records and legally change their name to Mars! There is NO BOUNDARY at which this joke will stop being funny.

Seriously. This is war.

Jaywalking: The Silent Killer

You know, we have a lot of laughs out on the blog, but today I'd like to talk about something serious. A couple weeks ago I got handed one of the most alarming flyers ever to change hands. Not alarming because of what it told me, alarming because of the fact that it implied an appalling ignorance of the general public to one of the most dangerous trends we’ve seen in years.

Jaywalking.

More like not okaywalking.

First and foremost, I feel like I should go over some of the facts presented in the flyer just to give you all a feel for how urgent a situation we’ve caught ourselves in.

#1. Jaywalking kills. This one was actually the title of the flyer, but honestly, is there any debate here? You wouldn’t let your grandma jaywalk, would you?

#2. Nearly every 9 minutes one pedestrian gets injured in the United States. So I skipped two facts on the flyer to get to this one, because I’m fairly certain that by now those of you who at any point gave me your numbers and have been receiving “are you ok?” text messages at 9-minute intervals are wondering by now what has sparked this incredible, deeply concerned and sensitive side of me. Some of you may be pursuing legal action to get me to stop, and to you all I can say is this: I hope you use a crosswalk on the way to court. I know I will.

#3. Most UVA students do not approve of Jaywalking. An eye-opening statistic indeed! Think about the subtext here for a second. UVA has somewhere around 15,000 students. If the unusually high percentage of “most” of them (which is A LOT larger than “slightly more than half”) disapprove of jaywalking, that means that every time you and your contempt for minor inconveniences are bearing the weight of more than 7,500 disapproving opinions. Think about how many facebook friends you have. I bet it’s a lot less than the amount of jaywalkingsbook enemies you’re getting.

Now at this point, some of you may be asking questions like “but what about suburban streets that lack crosswalks?” and “what about entering crosswalks at stoplights before the timer runs out? Surely it’s not so black and white! It’s all in shades of graywalking!”

My answer to this is to think of it as playwalking, as in, “play it as safe as possible at all times”walking. Stay on the crosswalks, make sure you have enough time, drive across the street in suburban neighborhoods, be as careful as possible. It’s not worth the price you could paywalking.

Seriously though guys, don’t get run over.

And Boom Goes the Dynamite

Alright everybody, since David broke the story-posting ice (below, if you haven't read it), I figured I'd go ahead and continue the trend. Of course, not everything I post on this is going to be a story because like, mannn, you can't turn creativity on like a faucet mannnnn. You gotta feeeeeeel it mannnnn. Dammit, I'm an idiot.

Anyway, I had this whole post planned out earlier today, and it was really awesome, but now South Park is on and some guy is at the door knocking incessantly while another guy mutters inanities into the wood, so yeah. Enjoy the story.

The Status Quo

It ended with a stabbing.

That’s why I was running. We were all running, and the stabbing was why we were running. I was halfway to the front of the group with the bloody knife, and if it hadn’t have been so dark the guys behind me would’ve been able to see the drops fly off of it and disturb the puddles scattered around. Hopefully a dog would come by later and piss where they’d dropped. Nothing covers up evidence like rainwater and dog piss.

We’d stabbed the guy because Marty’d had a vision, and when Marty was concerned you listened. When Andy started talking about how we were all screwed over, he usually meant he’d had a vision of one of us tripping over a log or some trivial shit like that. Not Marty. If Marty said we had to go, we went. If there were questions, they came later.

We lived like fugitives because we were fugitives.

We were fugitives because we were a menace, and we were a menace because we could see the future. That’s not any Ray Bradbury bullshit either, the quarantine they put on us was legit. We had a disease, and it was the disease that made us see the future.

Here’s how it went.

When you had it, you started out latent. You were latent for 6 months, 4 days, 12 hours, and 16 minutes, then you started having visions. It was never any less than 6 months, 4 days, 12 hours, and 16 minutes before you started having visions. It was never more either, the latent period was always the same. Then they came.

Once they started you had no control over when, where, or why you had them. That’s why all of us, the ones who had it, traveled in packs of five. If anybody started having one while we were fighting, we needed to get all four sides. We did that because if anyone touched the one who was peering, we called it peering, then they’d be sick, too. That’s how you got it, by coming into contact with someone who was peering. Either that or mosquitoes. Mosquitoes carried it, too.

Of the five of us, I was the only one who was still latent. It was going to be 13 days before the onset, and they knew that, because I’d gotten it when I’d tripped over the trashcan in a bathroom and plowed right into Jack. He flipped out and grabbed me by the arm, then he dragged me to the others and they told me what was happening to me. We’d been six for a while, because they were showing me how to survive, and how to keep the others alive. Then Kevin had developed apocalyptica. He was dead now.

Apocalyptica is the final stage of the disease. It doesn’t have a set period before it develops like the second stage, it varies from person to person, depending on how well your mind handles trauma. Some people snap like a twig and it takes over them in 2 weeks. For others it can take years. The first known case of it was in a guy named Edward Callahan, and it had taken him 6 ½ years to go apocalyptic.

What it is is the result of the fact that people aren’t supposed to see the future. Eventually the mental strain of using all 100 percent of your brain, that’s how it works, adds up and you snap. You start hallucinating your own death constantly, and you lose your ability to differentiate between hallucinations and visions. Then you get paranoid, then you get violent. Eventually every person you see becomes a threat, and you kill them. You lose control of your faculties, the only purpose of your body becomes to defend your brain, and it defends your brain by going on killing streaks. There’ve even been rumors of people floating completely off, creating their own world that they think they’re walking in while their body is ripping apart everything in site.

That’s why we were being quarantined. It wasn’t because we were special, it was because we were all going to be mass-murderers.

The prison system couldn’t handle all of us, so the quarantine was more of an extermination. Once they caught you, you were dead. No questions asked, none. It would’ve been safer for everyone if they’d been able to let loose one bomb and kill us all. It would’ve been safer for everyone if we’d all just turned ourselves in, but some of us weren’t that noble.

I wasn’t.

That’s why we fought back, and I mean fought. We had people working on a cure for us, and we held out hope by lashing out. They couldn’t hold us, we knew that, we were either in jailcells, which there weren’t enough of, killing each other, or we were apocalyptic in quarantine rooms, killing each other. The vaccine had already been developed, and it was required. The cure though, they were still working on that. If we survived, we got cured, that was how it worked. We saw the window closing, and we kept it open with shotguns.

All of us worked together. All of us. For a while we’d been isolated from each other, huddling in corners, setting traps, waiting, but then we lashed out. We started getting visions of others of us being caught and executed, and we stopped them. If we saw a guy getting caught on sixth street, we lobbed grenades off the bridge to block off the road. It didn’t matter if you knew the guy or not, if you knew he was one of you, you saved him. That was how it worked. The reason that it worked was because visions never took themselves into account. You could still mess up what you saw as long as you didn’t keep quiet about it and huddle in a corner. That’s all we wanted to do, really, was huddle in corners and stay alive, but they would’ve caught us if we did that. We had to act on everything, so we did.

The police found out fast that it’s remarkably difficult to fight an entire group of people that sees you coming. It’s even harder when you don’t even know you’re coming, because you can’t identify them, and you can’t communicate with anyone else who’s hunting them. The only way we ever got caught was when we were busy committing other crimes and they nabbed us for those, because they tested everybody they got once they got back to the precinct. The only way anyone ever knew beforehand that they were headed toward grabbing one of us was the fact that their car was full of bullet holes.

Police cars were the easiest ones to get, because they always had their sirens on. The sirens had been on non-stop ever since the sever.

The sever was a experiment in massive area signal jamming carried out by the military a little less than a decade ago. They were trying to find a way to sever all enemy wireless communications during warfare, because warfare seems to pop up at inconvenient times. Instead they severed all domestic wireless communications. Permanently. By permanently I mean for 20 years.

The explanation for why it happened is elusive. It’s elusive because we found out that the explanation for everything was elusive without the internet. It got hard to know shit when we lost the internet.

The only thing that still works right now are landline phones. Ethernet cables and all that don’t work, and if I had the explanation for the sever I’d have an explanation for that, but I don’t. Landline phones work, that’s what I know.

They started turning the sirens on all the time because most landline phones and payphones had been phased out, which meant that it was really freaking hard to call 911 when you needed to. There was a spike in the crime rate after the sever, so police cars started leaving their sirens on. That was enough of a deterrent, just knowing how close a sqadcar was at any given moment. If you were ever in a place where you couldn’t hear one, you were probably about to get mugged, but most of the time it worked pretty well.

If you were ever in a place where you couldn’t hear one, it was probably because of us. It was probably because we’d just beat it in with a golf club.

We were outnumbered, feared, and running, but the odds were still stocked in our favor. The status quo meant everything, so we maintained it. We kept the slums the slums, those neighborhoods that never got police protection got even less protection once we started going around, because we had to keep ourselves safe. When the sirens weren’t going off, we weren’t in danger, it was that simple. Every time we had to go out of our stronghold to save somebody the ice took over. To us those sirens were the same as the buzzing of an electric chair. There was no negotiation involved, only the flick of a switch and the end.

That’s why the stabbing happened. Marty had had a vision, and in that vision the guy we stabbed was driving away from a restaurant after having eaten there, he didn’t see who with or what he’d eaten, but Marty saw which restaurant. Next the guy pulled out into an intersection and started having a vision. He was one of us, it hurts to say that, but we stabbed one of our own. He hadn’t known he was one of us, because he’d gotten the disease from one of those mosquitoes that carried it, exactly 6 months, 4 days, 12 hours, and 16 minutes before the time in the vision. He started having is own vision, a vision within a vision, a metavision, and because he was having a vision he missed the red light.

Because he missed the red light, he pulled straight out into the intersection, where another man, a doctor, slammed straight into him. The doctor, being a doctor, went to go see what had happened to the other man, and he found him dead. His head had slammed into the driver’s side window, his skull had cracked, he had died. The doctor, once again being a doctor, noticed that the blood from the man’s head didn’t quite look right.

This is why we had to stab someone.

Noticing that the blood didn’t look quite right led the doctor to run tests on it, to find out what was not quite right about it. That’s when he discovered that having a vision meant a person’s brain was secreting a very special, very detectable chemical compound. I say very detectable because Marty’s vision jumped forward 3 days when they’d developed a scanner that would tell any person when one of us was nearby, and when they were having a vision. What that meant was that they weren’t just catching us out of luck anymore. What that meant was that there weren’t enough of us to stop them all. They got the last one after 3 months. Marty told me I was the first one to get caught, because they’d found our fivesome first, and all of us had escaped except me.

We stabbed a guy to death to stop that from happening, which is why we were running. We were running until we heard the screech of rubber, followed by the crunch of metal. Andy’s eyes got huge when he heard it. He just looked straight at me, and I heard him say “no…..” Then he bolted back out of the alley we were in, towards the sound. All of us bolted.

What Marty’s vision hadn’t told him was that the guy we stabbed had been having dinner with his identical twin, and that his twin had left out the same exit and gotten murdered by me, two minutes earlier. Not the best of news.

The rest of it came true. There was no reason why it shouldn’t have.

Once that happened the sirens disappeared everywhere. They had the decision between keeping the crime rate consistently down or letting it spike for the weeks they spent rounding us all up, and they chose the latter. The status quo disappeared.

They showed up with their scanner in the alley behind Gnome’s while Adam was watching himself die for the first time. First they shot Adam in the head, because once one of us went apocalyptic he had to be shot in the head, then they all scattered. I didn’t scatter fast enough. They cuffed me and drove me to the precinct, then they tested me.

Then the system came through for me. They told me they couldn’t kill me without trial while I was still latent, because when the quarantinextermination was put into effect it only specified people who were, at that moment, capable of seeing the future, and therefore, at that moment, at risk of developing apocalyptica. Instead they arrested me on one of the various unsolved murders around the city. There’s not much difference between death row and the death row waiting list, just for the record.

10 days after that I saw the future for the first time.

What I saw was the floor falling apart beneath my feet, and the floor falling apart beneath everyone else’s feet, and then the ground beneath the floor falling apart under the floor. I saw it cracking and shattering and felt myself falling, and everyone else falling, and I looked down and there was nothing. I couldn’t see anything, and we were all falling into it, and we kept falling. What scares me is that I didn’t see myself die.

Entering the Blawgosphere

Since Michael set up the blog and posted first, I thought I might take some pressure off and be the first to put up an actual story. Since this summer I’ve been writing religiously (or in other words, only on Christmas and Easter), with stories ranging from the clever to the complex to the sloppy to the truly-God-awful-and-completely-unpublishable. I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting, but I’ll try to keep it frequent just for you, whoever you are. Please, let me know your opinions, suggestions, and interpretations of whatever I put out there, even and especially if it’s negative (but not too harsh, please. I’m delicate). It can only benefit us both.

So, without further adieu, here’s my first short story, Cacophony:

Cacophony

A car. An alley. Headlights.

“Hey, don’t leave me waitin’ around like this again, man! I musta been here for a month or two.”

“Yeah, well, you can wait. I was busy.”

“Sure, sure, busy, busy. Ain’t we all. You got ‘im?”

“Of course I have him.”

“Hey man, okay, okay, calm down. Where is ’e?”

“Trunk.”

“Alright, well, hows about we get ‘im outa there?”

Click.

“Ok, slow now, let’s just set ‘im down, nice an’ easy like. Here, take this out, we gotta be able to talk to ‘im.”

“Please, please, you’ve made a mistake! I don’t know who you are, I don’t have anything! You’re looking for somebody–”

“Shut it! You talk when we say you talk!”

“Hey, come on now, let’s not be violent, I think you hurt ‘im. Aw, look man, he won’t be able to say anythin’ if you keep kickin’ ‘im like that.”

“That’d be just fine with me.”

“No, no, we need to find out where the stuff is, you know that. Why’d you think you brought ‘im here, so we could stare at ‘im while ’e’s bleedin’?”

“Fine. Then let’s at least make him say something useful.”

“Yeah, okay. Hey buddy, you gonna cooperate with us?”

“I’m not who you’re looking for, I swear, I’ve never seen you before in my life!”

“Well o’ course not, we’re not the ones you been screwin’, now are we? You didn’ think they’d come all the way out here, did ya?”

“I swear, I swear, please just let me go, I can give you some money, I won’t go to the police, please just listen to me!”

“Hey, pal, my partner here asked you a simple question. Are you going to cooperate with us, or not?Because if not, I wasn’t quite done with you.”

“Yes, yes, I’ll do whatever you say, just–”

“Wait wait wait wait. Hold on. You sure this is ‘im?”

“What? Of course I’m sure.”

“No, like for positive, sure. Here, I’ve got a picture, I think this might really be the wrong guy.”

“I– I don’t…”

“Look, ’ere, buddy, put your face up by this picture… Shit. This ain’t the right guy.”

“What? But– how did–?”

“Ah, don’ worry about it, easy mistake. I mean, these boys do look pretty similar. We should let ‘im go. Why don’ you cut ‘im loose? An’ pal, I really am sorry about all this.”

“Oh thank God! Thank you so much! I don’t–”

Bang.

“Whoa! What the hell! Jesus, man, what’d you do that for?”

“We couldn’t a actually let ‘im go, you know that. I don’ wanna hafta compromise, you know?”

“So you just shoot him? I was right next to him!”

“Ah, come off it. I couldn’t a hit you if I tried, you was so far from ‘im.”

“Jesus, man, what the hell! Why’d you even have me untie him if you were just going to shoot him?”

“I dunno, it’s jus’ a habit. Anyhow, it’s a nice rope.”

“A nice rope? Jes–”

“Would you cool it? You might be the funniest guy I’ve seen, you know that? One minute you’re kickin’ the shit outta ‘im, an’ then when I join in, you’re goddamned Mother Theresa over there. It’s like you never even seen somebody get shot before.”

“Yeah. Well . . .”

“Shit, you haven’t? Damn, I woulda given you some warning! Ha ha, that’s jus’ funny! Welcome to the business, my friend!”

“Um.”

“Okay, but all kiddin’ aside, we gotta do somethin’ about this. I say we jus’ go to his effin house, for Chrissake.”

“What?”

“This guy, the real one, we got so unlucky, I say we jus’ go to the one place we know he’s gonna be.”

“I don’t–”

“Look, that was my bad, but I’ll warn you next time! An’ there ain’t gonna be a next time, don’ worry, we’ll do it all smooth like, we jus’ go in, get ‘im, an’ get out, no problemo.”

“. . . Yeah. Sorry, yeah, all right. Let’s go.”

Knock, knock, knock.

“Hello?”

“Hello, ma’am. My name’s George an’ this is Ben, an’ we’re sellin’ our premium vacuums, really a great buy, an’ we were jus’ wonderin’ if you’d be interested?”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry, we don’t usually order things from travelling salesmen. If you wanted to mail us something–"

“Ma’am, I don’ think you understan’, these are some nice cleaners, maybe we can jus’ give you a demonstration?”

“No, I don’t usually let strangers in our house.”

“Well, maybe there’s someone else home we could talk to?”

“My husband’s home, yes, but we’d rather not–”

Bang.

“Shit! God damn it, you said you’d warn me!”

“Come on now, you saw, she wasn’ about to let us in, an’ she said ’e’s here.”

“Yeah, probably sitting up in his room with a gun after hearing that! That was loud as hell!”

“Well, nothin’ you can do about that.”

“Yes there is, a silencer, damn it!”

“Look, we gonna stand here like idiots or we gonna go do our job?”

“Alright, let’s go, but come on, no more bullshit, please.”

“Hey, Rivers, we got a call coming in.”

“Oh yeah? Where from?”

“Down on Maple, a woman said she heard gunshots at the neighbor’s.”

“Okay, let’s go check it out.”

Sirens.

“You know, when you did it, I thought you musta been outa your mind, but now, well, I guess ’e’s jus’ a tough guy to track down. I mean, the odds we get the wrong guy twice in a row…”

“Huh.”

“An’ even if this had been the right house, her husband wasn’ even home!”

“Yeah, well, she probably says that when there’s two strange guys asking to come inside.”

“Funny, that didn’ do quite what she wanted, huh?”

“Um.”

“Look, false advertisin’, that’s all it is.”

“It doesn’t even matter. This is the wrong house anyway.”

“Like I said, the odds are jus’ against it.”

Sirens.

“Shit! Where did they come from?”

“I dunno, let’s move, come on!”

“This is the police, put your weapons down and your hands up!”

“Here, come on, behind this car! We’re gonna hafta fight back, we’re not gonna get away runnin’!”

“You said this would be no problem! Easy, you said!”

“Hey, now is not the time!”

“If you do not put down your weapons, we will be forced to shoot. This is the police.”

“You ready?”

“What–”

Bang bang bang bang bang.

That's what's up

Sometimes I write.

For a while I tried sending out the writing to whatever artsily-named, obscure magazine that popped up on duotrope’s search engine when I checked “electronic submissions,” because I really freaking hate sealing envelopes. That didn’t work though, because I also really freaking hate rejection letters. Everybody’s always saying you’ve got to get somewhere around 600,000 rejection letters before you get published, and I get it. It’s not about being the next Hemmingway for me right now, because I’m 19 and I haven’t grown a grizzly beard. Give me ten years and a dead-end job and I’ll probably feel otherwise, but right about now its just about getting people reading.

They say you’ve got to write for yourself and it’s plenty satisfying, but lately I just haven’t been satisfied with everything I write collecting dust on the hard drive of a beaten-up macbook. When it comes down to it, finishing a story isn’t half as satisfying when you’ve got no idea what to do with it next. You can’t read it because, hell, you already know what’s going to happen and how it’s going to work out. It’s like watching Fight Club after you’ve already decided you didn’t have time to watch the movie and read the summary off Wikipedia.

That’s why this blog exists.

Sitting in Dillard Suite 113, I texted David saying I had a proposal. He asked if it involved Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock, because he’s a smartass, and I told him it didn’t, but it involved a blog. I ended up watching The Proposal the night after that, but it didn’t involve any blogs. I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive, but I really hope you’re not here to read about The Proposal, because that wouldn’t make a lick of sense.

What does make at least a couple of licks worth of sense is that what we’ve got here is the home of David and I and whoever else may pop up laters’ various writings, various rantings, and various whatever else seems like a good idea at the time. Stop by, read our stuff, and leave a comment if you feel like it. I promise it’s good.

It's also copyrighted by the authors, if you're wondering.